Prion diseases, also known
as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, are a group of fatal
neurodegenerative diseases that include scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob ...

Programmed cell death (PCD) describes a small number of processes that result in a highly controlled, and organised, form of cellular destruction, activated in every part of the plant, throughout its entire life cycle. For ...

Aims to describe the variation in breeding bird populations that occur on different types of Irish peatlands and their associated habitat characteristics.
Methods: Bird abundance and diversity were compared between four ...

The coupled δ13C-radiocarbon systematics of three European stalagmites deposited during the Late Glacial and early Holocene were investigated to understand better how the carbon isotope systematics of speleothems respond ...

A panel of repetitively branched synthetic molecules known as dendrimers is used to identify and differentiate between different strains of the prion infectious agent, the protein-based pathogen responsible for prion ...

Farmland birds have suffered a severe decline in recent years throughout Europe including Ireland. Agricultural intensification is believed to be the main cause and this has led to the introduction of agri-environmental ...

Well-constrained estimates of adult body mass for fossil platyrrhine species (New World "monkeys") are essential for resolving numerous paleobiological questions. However, no consensus exists as to which craniodental ...

The Fusarium genus of fungi is responsible for commercially devastating crop diseases and the contamination of cereals with harmful mycotoxins. Fusarium mycotoxins aid infection, establishment, and spread of the fungus ...

Background: Recently it has been shown that Ensifer adhaerens can be used as a plant transformation technology, transferring genes into several plant genomes when equipped with a Ti plasmid. For this study, we have sequenced ...

Upland headwater streams are dynamic systems, responding rapidly to changes in climatic conditions. This study examined the effects of a catastrophic rainfall event, that occured on 24 October 2011 on the east coast of ...

Field boundaries and fields in stubble, set-aside, winter wheat and improved grassland in County Kildare were surveyed for birds on 15 occasions between October 2001 and February 2002. A total of 40 species was recorded ...

Prion diseases are characterized by the accumulation of PrP(Sc), an aberrantly folded isoform of the host protein PrP(C). Specific forms of synthetic molecules known as dendrimers are able to eliminate protease-resistant ...

Ethanol is the most-widely used biofuel in the world today. Lignocellulosic plant biomass derived from agricultural residue can be converted to ethanol via microbial bioprocessing. Fungi such as Fusarium oxysporum can ...

In Arabidopsis thaliana we demonstrate that dying root hairs provide an easy and rapid in vivo model for the morphological identification of apoptotic-like programmed cell death in plants. The model described here is ...

The Fusarium mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) can cause cell death in wheat (Triticum aestivum), but can also reduce the level of cell death caused by heat shock in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) cell cultures. We show ...

Pathogenic fungal infections of barley can lead to costly crop losses. However, not all
fungal infections are detrimental, and some are even beneficial. Beneficial root infections
often involve symbiotic endophytic ...

We examine spatial association of bovine TB in cattle herds using data from Ireland.
Badgers (Meles meles), a protected species under the Wildlife Act 1976 (OAG 2012),
have been implicated in the spread of the disease ...